Post navigation

Professor Sandra Walklate has been confirmed as the first International Guest for the Crime, Justice and Social Democracy Research Centre 5th Biennial Conference being held on the Gold Coast from 15-17 July 2019.

Sandra Walklate is currently Eleanor Rathbone Chair of Sociology at the University of Liverpool, conjoint Chair of Criminology at Monash University in Melbourne and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Social Justice, QUT. She has been Editor in Chief of the British Journal of Criminology and in July 2019 becomes President of the British Society of Criminology. She has been researching in the field of criminal victimisation since the early 1980s and her recent publications reflect her ongoing and critical interests in this field, and the capacity of criminology to make sense of the impact of violence in particular on women’s lives.

Image 1: John Scott with members of the USP Policing Program, Danielle Watson and Casandra Harry

Image 2: Vice Chancellor of the University of the South Pacific, Professor Rajesh Chandra

CJRC member and Acting Head of School of Justice at QUT, Professor John Scott, recently visited the University of the South Pacific’s main Fiji campus where he engaged with staff in the School of Social Sciences about a number of ongoing initiatives in the space of southern criminology. In particular, QUT staff, and staff of the Pacific Policing Program, USP, are collaborating on projects looking at policing in the Pacific, and the ecology of crime in island communities.

The Discipline Coordinator of the USP Policing program, Dr Danielle Watson is an Adjunct with the School of Justice

Abstract:
This paper draws inspiration from Frank Pearce’s insistence, over forty years ago in his Crimes of the Powerful, that ‘It is not possible to explain … systematic continuous [corrupt] behaviour in terms of the “greed” of a few individuals’ and that anti-corruption prosecutions ‘by condemning an infraction as illegal and abnormal serve ‘to dramatise an imaginary social order’. It presents a case study of corruption investigations and proceedings involving ‘disgraced’ former New South Wales upper house ‘numbers man’ of the Labor party, Eddie Obeid, currently serving a prison sentence for wilful misconduct in public office.
While justice will be seen to be done in this case and the process is clearly justifiable, the crimes of Obeid and his cohort are small change compared to large-scale corporate corruption. The Obeid family is not General Electric or Westinghouse. Why, then, the public theatre? What function does it serve? This paper argues that such charades act out the fantasy that the normal workings of capitalism are uncorrupted, and that abnormal aberrations can be rooted out, to the public benefit. The earlier cartels and anti-competitive price-fixing of monopoly capitalism shown by Pearce to be endemic, are now supplemented by newer corporate criminal opportunities under neo-liberalism. In the focus on the lining of private pockets, our view is averted from the larger damage to public wellbeing of privatisation, contracting out of public resources, and depredation of the environment for short-term private profit.

@CrimeJusticeQUT

Adjunct Professor Scott Poynting
Scott Poynting is an adjunct professor in the School of Justice at QUT. He was founding professor in criminology at the University of Auckland (2013-16) and was previously Professor in Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is author of 99 journal articles and scholarly chapters, and co-author or co-editor of a dozen books, the most recent of which is Media, Crime and Racism, just published by Palgrave. He co-edited, with David Whyte, the December 2017 special issue of the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, on ‘Corruption Downunder’.

Associate Professor Molly Dragiewicz, from the CJRC, and her two co-authors Professors Walter Dekeseredy and Marty Schwartz were awarded the best book prize by the Victimology Division of the American Society of Criminology , 2017.

In another prize ceremony Professor Rob White from University of Tasmania, and adjunct professor with the CJRC, QUT won the Lifetime Achievement Award, Division of Critical Criminology, ASC, 2017. Rob was also recognised for his global contribution to criminology, by the International Division of the ASC.

Professor John Scott and CJRC Adjunct Professor Victor Minichiello have recently been featured in an article on The Age website discussing male sex workers. The article “Male sex workers call for respect, understanding” details the extensive discrimination and stigma that male sex workers are continuously subject to as a result of various myths and stereotypes about such work, along with strict legislative regulations. Read more